Homestead Weekly Update

I mentioned in last week’s homestead update that I had a lot of larvae laying on the top bars when I took apart the hives. I e-mailed my pictures to my bee course instructor who is also the inspector for my county. She reports back that because of the placement of the cells that these came from, they are almost certainly drone larvae. The bees like to build drone comb between the frames. If these were queen cells, the bees would have built the cells hanging down from the bottom of the frames, not placed them horizontal. I didn’t see any queen cells hanging down so I’m good to go. She did tell me that next time I’m in the hive, I should scrape the comb off the bottom of the boards to clean up the hive.

Seed potatoes

I’ve been thinking about trying to grow potatoes for quite a few years. I just never really got around to growing them. But the other day I was in Tractor Supply Company and spotted the seed potatoes on the shelf. We typically eat Russet potatoes, white potatoes and red skinned potatoes. They had all these on the shelf. I decided that I would try the red skinned type so I grabbed a 5 lb bag of Red Norland seed potatoes. Here’s a shot of some of the potatoes before I prepared them to be planted.

Cut seed potatoes

Even though I’ve been planning on these potatoes for some time, I had to look up what to do with them. For those that don’t know, typically you don’t plant the entire potato. So I cut up the potatoes so that there was an eye on each section of potato. I’ll leave these on this cooling rack for 3 or 4 days. The potato will develop a cuticle or scab on the cut edge. This keeps the potato from rotting once it’s planted. I also found mentioned that it may keep insects from eating the potato before it grows. Hopefully I’ll plant these potatoes this coming weekend.

I would have planted something this weekend. But the weather has been so screwy. We had very heavy rain all weekend. That is except for the period of Sunday where it turned to sleet and snow. Luckily it didn’t amount to much, just a dusting.